WordPress

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Editors' Review

WordPress has developed into one of the most robust and customizable website development platforms on the Internet today and only continues to grow. As a free, open-source platform, it offers thousands of options for expansion and customization, whether through themes and plug-ins or custom code.

Pros

Extremely customizable platform: WordPress is highly customizable. From creation of custom pages to quick changes to the permalinks of your pages, it allows you to do just about anything you want with a site. Even then, plug-ins and themes are available to upgrade and enhance your website in many ways.

Open source and supported by many tools: WordPress is an open-source platform, so it is free. You can download it from Wordpress.org and install it in minutes if you have your own server. The last part can be a hurdle for some who are not experienced in website development, but the support community for this tool is immense with more than a decade's worth of updates, plug-ins, themes, and third-party tools that integrate with it.

Cons

Installation and maintenance require some technical knowledge: The one con of using a tool like WordPress is that it is not as simple as some plug-and-play website builders. You will need your own server, and you'll need some basic skills to create the necessary resources and upload the files to that server. Ongoing maintenance can also be technical to a degree, so it is important that you feel comfortable doing this or have access to a resource to help with it.

Bottom Line

Whether you're a website creation pro, or you're just building your first site, WordPress is a great platform. Offering plenty of entry-level themes and plug-ins for a quick-to-create website experience and the depth needed by seasoned developers to really experiment, it's a true standout in the world of open-source software.

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Publisher's Description

WordPress is a personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, Web standards, and usability. WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-structured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there.

absolutely simple to install, set up a sql data base, unzip the file, get your passwords and you are ready to go. There are plenty of free plug-ins, and even more low priced plug-ins, so you can do virtually anything you want.

Cons

It takes a little practice to use if you are not familiar with sql, so you need to know a smattering of php and have some basic idea of how to set up your sql database.

Summary

I have many blogs on this platform and they run virtually problem free. There are often a flurry of update to install as security issues are uncovered and plug-ins update to work with the releases. I really enjoy using this platform.

Certainly there are a lot of good features, but these are shared by virtually every other blog product on the market.

Cons

The obfuscation of code is outrageous, if not unethical and immoral. Simple changes that should take minutes take hours to simply find WHERE to make the change. Official documentation is incomplete, not including many important function calls.

Summary

If you know enough php to edit your scripts, then you're better off writing your own scripts WITHOUT SENSELESS OBFUSCATION and building a fully custom blog from scratch. It may take two to three times as long, but eventually you'll get what you want, and if you have any maintenance to do or subtle changes to make, you'll save big time in the long run. Sorry Wordpress, but I have to give you a D-.

Could not get program to install. Quit after two hours.No program removal function.

Summary

I downloaded the program because of the good reviews. I hate to have to unzip anything, but I did it for this one. Why is it necessary to still have use zipped functions. The programs claims to have an easy five minute install. I spent two hours and was never able to get it to install or function at all. The error messages were even confusing. I must be a dunce because all the other reviews are great. When I finally gave up, I found out that there was no way to uninstall this program. I wanted it to work and I really tried.

Wordpress is an amazing blogging tool. Having read through reviews I settled on Wordpress for a rather uncompelling reason - it was completely free, it looked ok and it installed via Fantastico, which meant less hassle for me.

I was not disappointed. Wordpress installation was a breeze - 30 seconds flat. Even if your host doesn't have Fantastico - there are very detailed, step by step instructions for an install which should take about 5 minutes (I haven't tried though). You can also get Wordpress.org to install it for you in the unlikely event that you get stuck.

Having installed Wordpress on my server it took me less than an hour to chose a theme from thousands of free themes available and customise it to my liking. Bear in mind that I don't know any php, have minimal html skills and have never had a blog before. Therefore the learning curve from zero to up and running was less than an hour.

One of the best things about WordPress is that there are thousands of wonderful and completely free widgets and plugins. They are extremely easy to install (usually upload a folder on your server and click a button in Wordpress Admin interface) and I am yet to encounter an issue for which I couldn't find a plugin. Most come with detailed instructions and help from developers.

Setting up a blog with Wordpress.com is supposedly easier than self-hosting, but the level of knowledge required to get Wordpress.org software up and running is minimal, so if you have a host and are chosing between the two options - I'd strongly recommend going with the self-hosted version - you get lots of flexibility and it is just so easy.

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